THE FIRST TIME MIKE SOLOMON SMOKED CRACK, HE RAN. He was at a friend’s house, and somebody pulled out a rock. They’d smoked plenty of weed before, but here was this new thing, with this new pipe; Mike doesn’t remember if he had even heard of it before. His friend taught him how to smoke it, and gave him a hit, then told him to go down the street and grab a case of beer. He stepped out of the house, and he doesn’t know why, but he just started running. Full tilt. Sprinted in the darkness. Maybe it was two blocks, maybe 10. He got to the store and didn’t blink once. He couldn’t believe how it felt.

He bought the beer, left the store, and again, he ran. He arrived back at the house faster than anyone there had expected, out of breath and wild-eyed. His friends looked at him in the doorway. He couldn’t figure out why they couldn’t stop laughing. He looked down and saw a half empty case of beer in his hand. A trail of cans lay all down the street.

“I was like, ‘Whoa,’” he says. “‘Give me another one of those.’”

IT WAS AN EARLY SUMMER MORNING IN 2007, and the sun had yet to come up. Abdullah Dorch and Craig Hall still had sleep in their eyes. But their beds at the Sunday Breakfast Rescue Mission in downtown Philadelphia weren’t free; they had to earn their keep by fixing breakfast for the few dozen transients who soon would be lining up outside, looking for something to eat.

Later in the day, the mission would transform. The dingy downstairs would fill with 20 or so men sweating, wearing more than they should be in the summertime, no closet in which to stash the winter coat. They’d trade stories of what happened out in the world since the last time they were here, and absent-mindedly thumb through the copious Christian literature there for the taking. It would take a couple tries for the voice saying it’s time for chapel to rise above the chattering din.

But at 5 in the morning, the only sounds were the quiet suck of a refrigerator being opened, a dropped spoon clanging on the floor, and the sleepy groan that followed. The kitchen overlooked a forgotten block of 13th Street, with the occasional body sleeping under a blanket on the cracked sidewalks, trash blowing up the street from Chinatown. The foot traffic here was mostly confined to those loitering outside the shelter, which was why the sight of a pretty blond girl jogging down the street was enough to make Dorch and Hall set down their spatulas and take notice.

BLOND AMBITION During an early morning run, Anne Mahlum got the inspiration to help Philly’s homeless.

Steve Boyle

“What is she doing here?” Dorch asked.

“What is she thinking?” Hall followed.

“She’s gotta be crazy.”

“Or lost.”

“Does she know where she is?”

The next day: same wrong neighborhood, same time, same pretty blond girl. Clearly, if she was here again, she wasn’t lost, which narrowed down the possible explanations for her choice of running route considerably.

“That girl is crazy.”

Crazy, and persistent. She kept coming, enough that the two men began to expect her, to look for her. And eventually, in a tradition dating back to the beginning of men and women themselves, they called out to her.

“Hey, Runner Girl! What are you doing here, Runner Girl?”

The story might have ended like that. A couple of men yelling at a pretty blond, a pretty blond running by and disappearing around the corner to go about her life. Dorch and Hall might have remained a couple of homeless guys, and Anne Mahlum might have remained just another Crazy Runner Girl, if not for what happened next: She smiled, and waved.

FOR A LONG TIME, PHILADELPHIA WAS A MODEL FOR OTHER CITIES trying to tackle the problem of homelessness. In the late ‘90s, the city invested millions of dollars to get people off the streets and into homes. The homeless population of downtown Philadelphia dropped from more than 800 in the summer of 1997 to just over 200 by the summer of 2000. But since then, it’s been climbing, with the count topping 600 in the summer of 2007. And this doesn’t take into account the number of people sleeping in shelters; many facilities across the city report they’re operating at capacity.

Someone can end up homeless for any number of reasons. Lack of affordable housing is a big factor. There’s mental illness, common among the homeless population. And many on the street have or have had problems with substance abuse. Like Mike Solomon and his battles with crack. Or Abdullah Dorch and his cocaine. Pick any guy at the Sunday Breakfast Rescue Mission, and he’ll likely tell you his story. They have all taken different paths to get there.

Their life stories were not on Anne Mahlum’s mind that first morning she ran by the mission. But the next day’s run produced the smile and the wave. A few runs later, there was a “How you guys doing this morning?” And then on one run, a few steps past the shelter, a thought suddenly came to her: Why do I get to be the runner, and they have to be the homeless guys? Why can’t we all just be runners?

Mahlum surely was not the first runner to have such a sentiment, but she had a mind for organization and planning that turned the feeling into action. The 27-year-old had just quit one public-relations job to take on another; she was going to be a big-time manager of government relations for a cable TV company. But before she started her new gig, she approached Sunday Breakfast with an idea to start a running club for the guys living there. She is a tough person to say no to—her capacity for public relations and marketing seem more personality trait than job skill—and the shelter decided to give it a go. Within a few weeks, she found funding, secured sponsorship and assistance from a local running store, recruited volunteers. She came up with a name, a PR person’s dream: Back on My Feet. In the glacially paced world of nonprofit organizations, BOMF, as it would become known, was a runner among walkers. She never made it to that job at the cable company.

It is a crazy idea, when you read it or speak it: a homeless running club. Crazier, maybe, was her plan to get a bunch of guys who weren’t running a step to run a half marathon just a couple of months later. And the craziest thing of all, perhaps, is the theory that something as simple as running could help a group of homeless guys get their lives back on track. But when Mahlum says, “I really believe the joy that running has brought to my life can bring something positive to these guys,” it doesn’t sound crazy. It doesn’t sound like marketing or spin. It sounds like the words of someone who believes.

WHEN YOU TAKE PEOPLE FROM TWO DIFFERENT WORLDS and put them in T-shirts and running shorts, there’s no distinguishing their histories. So on this August morning, an observer from afar would see not a group of four or five homeless guys made up of ex-cons and former crack addicts gathered on a sidewalk outside a shelter in Philadelphia, but a bunch of guys in running shorts up at an ungodly hour, about to go for a run.

It’s about a month into the life of Back on My Feet. The first few men to sign on had joined less out of a desire to run and more because it was better than doing nothing. And, of course, they could spend a half hour with a pretty blond girl, even if she was a Crazy Runner Girl. Still, they had been suspicious. Who is this girl? What does she want? Why is she here?

The runs, at first, were slow, and short, with a fair amount of walking thrown in. Mahlum, to everyone’s surprise, kept showing up. And she kept jogging up beside them, saying “looking good” or “take it easy.” They were used to people coming and then going, but she, apparently, wasn’t going anywhere. She was there every other morning, every mile. She told them they’d keep building, and in November they’d be able to run the Philadelphia Half Marathon.

With every step of running, they trusted her a little more. They saved their skepticism for the runs themselves, as this fast-forward version of their mileage buildup reveals:

Anne: Guys, today we’re running one mile.

The Guys: One mile! You gotta be crazy!

The Guys, after the mile: That was easy.

Anne, a couple of days later: Guys, we’re going two miles.

The Guys: Two miles! You gotta be crazy!

And so on.

Today, more miles await them. Anne looks around at Mike Solomon, Craig Hall, and the rest of the bunch, doing what runners do: complaining about having to go run, stretching against parking meters. Now that Solomon is in his 40s, his hair has a lot more gray in it than when he made his crack-fueled beer run several years ago. Abdullah Dorch is a few steps up the sidewalk, ignoring the chatter around him. Mahlum has a smile that never leaves her face, and a confidence that makes “Are you ready?” sound like “You are ready.”

“All right guys, five miles today. Just run a real good, steady pace. Are you ready?”

This isn’t their first five-miler, but heads still shake in disbelief, as if it were impossible for any human to run that far.

“We gotta circle up, Anne,” says Solomon, bouncing up and down and smiling through his beard.

“Oh yeah! I thought we—yeah. Circle up.”

The group gathers in a circle, arms over shoulders. “Shep?”

This duty gets traded around from runner to runner, but Shep, as James Shepherd is known, ends up doing it the most. His prayers are long and rambling, and the solemnness of the moment he’s trying to create has often broken down into suppressed chuckles by his third or fourth “and.” If Shep’s endurance in running ever catches up to the length of his prayers, the group may have an ultramarathoner on their hands. Everybody looks to the ground as he begins. “Lord, we thank you for all the many blessings you’ve given to us, and we thank you for this morning and for waking us up this morning and for bringing us all here together and in good health, and for protecting us and keeping us safe on this run—”

MORNING GLORY In the predawn hour, the BOMF runners and coaches “circle up” in prayer (left) before taking off on a five-mile run.

Steve Boyle

There’s a collective inhale as the runners open their mouths for an amen, but Shep continues. “And we thank you for keeping us strong and giving us the strength to run with, and we thank you for giving us each other to run with...Amen.”

They repeat the amen back, which for these guys pretty much means go. The circle breaks, and Mahlum looks at her watch. It’s nearly 6 o’clock. “Let’s get going!”

Solomon, Dorch, and Shep, as well as Al Price and Darren Gordon, walk a few steps, until their walk turns imperceptibly into a shuffle, and then to a jog, and in a block they’re running. They turn onto Arch Street, where two homeless guys sleep in bags atop flattened boxes. A few months ago, the runners may have lived much the same way, but if it occurs to them this morning, they don’t show it. They’re focused on the task at hand: the unlikely goal that Mahlum set for them, the half marathon.

Solomon starts singing in the cadence of a military march. “I wanna run a marathon!”

The guys answer back: I wanna run a marathon!

“Gonna keep running from dusk to dawn!”

The group erupts: Gonna keep running from dusk to dawn!

EMBRACE THE MOMENT Solomon and BOMF volunteer Sunita Vege share the satisfaction of finishing a run through downtown Philly.

Steve Boyle

ABDULLAH DORCH IS LEAN AND MUSCULAR; he doesn’t look like he’s pushing 40. His upper body is an inverted triangle, more fit for a linebacker than a runner. He’s handsome, with dark eyes that flicker as he talks. When he smiles, he reveals one chipped tooth never repaired. The rest of the guys run in a pack that spreads out and condenses and spreads out again over the miles, but Dorch is usually off to the side, on his own, a bounce in his stride as if he’s always a few steps from taking a giant leap. Something about him looks meant for this, though, and passersby probably imagine he’s jogging from the gym rather than a homeless shelter.

He keeps his mouth shut as the I wanna run a marathon song is sung. There’s something solitary and withdrawn about him that suggests he follows his own rhythm.

Growing up in South Carolina, he always saw himself as a “good kid.” He kept to himself, loved his grandmother, did what she told him. He says he always had a song in his head, either tunes he’d written or the well-memorized lyrics to Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall. The default position of his brain was never silence. There was always music playing.

In his late teens, in the mid-’80s, Dorch decided to make a career out of music, and he left South Carolina for New York City with a couple of friends. He says they laid down some vocal tracks at a studio, but nothing ever came of it. He started using cocaine, and pretty soon he’d stopped thinking about music and spent most of his time trying to get high. “Music was my antidote,” he says. “Then coke took over. The drug wanted to be my only love. I loved it, and I didn’t want to let it go.”

In his early 20s, the music that had played in his head his entire life went silent. Where there had been symphonies, there was only quiet. His obsession with music had been replaced by addiction. He lived on the street. He conned people and he stole, mostly from drug dealers, he says. He spent the next 10 years in and out of prison. “I was a born masterminder,” Dorch says. “I always used it for bad.”

In July 1997, Dorch robbed a drug dealer but later got busted. In court, the judge held up his record of offenses and said, “You’re a career criminal.”

“I was like, ‘No, no. I just played the part,’” Dorch says. “‘I’m the one my grandmother raised.’” Dorch had viewed himself as two selves: There was the one out on the street hustling just to get by, and his true self, a good man, the one his grandmother raised. The judge was telling him they were the same person. “My lie ended. I was 28, 29, and I saw my life over.”

He did his time. He told himself he’d changed. But on his first day out, in November 2006, he got high. He saw himself falling into the old pattern, and it jolted him awake. “Every time I’d get into a good place I’d say, ‘Lord, don’t worry, I got this.’ And I’d fall right on my face. This time I was ready to do something different.” He checked himself into the Sunday Breakfast Rescue Mission, determined to “put it in His hands.” He thought he was signing on for religious healing, but when Back on My Feet came along, he figured running couldn’t hurt.

Ten months later, training for the half marathon and being coached by a Crazy Runner Girl, he’s found that running is one thing he can’t con. You can’t flash a smile at a distance race and tell it you did your long runs when you didn’t. You can’t convince a marathon you’ve trained; if you haven’t, it will reveal your lie, and harshly. He keeps running, and the silence in his head as he moves along the road is a warning of what’s at stake.

GROWING UP IN NORTH DAKOTA, ANNE MAHLUM HAD FEW COMPLAINTS. School came easy. Soccer and basketball came easy. She had lots of friends. Her family went to a cabin on the weekends. She spent summer afternoons playing in the yard. It seemed, in her words, “a perfect life.”

When she was 16, she came home from her boyfriend’s place on a hot July afternoon, and the big wooden door to her house was open. Only the screen door was in place. She saw her father sitting on the edge of the couch. Something was wrong. She walked over and sat down in a chair across from him, and looked into his eyes. “What is it, Dad?”

He cried as he told her. He had a gambling problem. A big one. He had just gambled away most of the family’s life savings. Her Mom was kicking him out. It was a small town; people would talk. She thought things like this happened to other families. He’d gambled away her “perfect life.”

She didn’t cry, sitting there with her dad. They finished talking and then she decided to lace up her running shoes and go for a run. Maybe it was something about the rhythm of her steps, or being alone, or the endorphins, but it was the run that brought it out of her. Sweat mixed with tears as she traveled down the road. She’d run for sports before, but this was the first time running meant something. Keep moving forward, she thought. Keep moving forward.

“AL,” SAYS MIKE SOLOMON, “Where we running? Where are we turning?”

“I think we’re running The Bridge.”

“The Bridge? Nobody told me we was running the bridge.”

The Bridge in question is the Ben Franklin Bridge: one of the few hills to be found in downtown Philadelphia. It’s a long climb and then a long descent into Camden, New Jersey. The out-and-back is just five miles, but something about running to another state and back always makes it feel like more. It’s quickly become a tradition to gripe about The Bridge, but Solomon, at least, loves the challenge of the hill.

“Last time we ran this,” Solomon says, “I was struggling. Anne comes up behind me, bouncing along, not even sweating. She tells me this thing Neil Armstrong said. She says, ‘You know all that pain you feeling now?’ She says, ‘Neil Armstrong says that pain you’re feeling now, that pain will go away. But if you quit, you gotta live with that forever.’ I was like…’Wow.’”

“Don’t you mean Lance Armstrong?” someone asks.

“Yeah! Lance Armstrong! You know I told like five people that story and told them it was Neil Armstrong!”

There’s laughter all around, soon to be replaced by heavy breathing, as the group approaches The Bridge. They’ve been moving along at just under eight-minute miles, pretty much the average these days. When Solomon hits the incline, he rockets ahead at a pace he can’t possibly sustain all the way up. After a half-mile uphill at a good clip, he slows to a barely-faster-than-walking trot, but he doesn’t walk, perhaps thinking of Lance (or Neil) Armstrong. Once he catches his breath, he’s off again, nearly at full tilt, something close to 6:30 pace. Then, in a minute, he’s back to that barely-faster-than-walking trot, only this time it’s not really even faster than walking. His eyes and mouth are scrunched toward the middle of his face as if he’d just tasted something bitter. It’s a look you see just before someone gives up and walks. But again, he doesn’t walk.

It’s down the other side and up again, and as the bridge reaches its peak over the Delaware River, Solomon looks down at Philadelphia, skyscrapers reflecting the first moments of the day’s sun. “It’s hard to believe we’re going to be running a marathon,” he says. (It’ll be a few weeks till they stop calling the 13.1-mile distance a marathon, but they’ll get there.) “A month ago, I was like, two miles? What? And now we’re going to run 13 miles?”

Solomon talks about running not as something he’s choosing to do, but as something he more or less was guided to do. The Sunday Breakfast Rescue Mission requires its residents to attend chapel, and there’s no telling who might be there for the sermon, and who might be putting up with the sermon just to get a bed for the night. Solomon, for one, is a man of faith. “The running’s not because of nothing I’m doing,” he says. “If it were my choice, I would still be somewhere sitting in a bar, mourning my wife’s death.”

“My wife always knew when I’d been smoking crack...because I would act like I’d been smoking crack.” He’d been through Narcotics Anonymous when he and Diana got together, and he wasn’t getting high as much as he once did. Still, from time to time, she’d find him with his buddies on a street corner, glass pipe in hand, and, with a stern eye, direct him home.

Their thing was drinking. After nine years together, they were both alcoholics, and then Diana began to get very sick. In March 2007, she died of kidney and liver failure. “You know, I go through a bad day and I’m struggling, and without getting too biblical on you, ain’t nothing new under the sun.” Solomon often says he doesn’t want to get too biblical on you, but he loves getting biblical on you. “This too shall pass. With or without me, the sun is going to come up tomorrow. And this I saw, after my wife died. Things have to happen. I say, ‘Hey, we gonna die. You know? Might as well make the most of it.’”

EARLY ONE SUMMER MORNING, ANNE MAHLUM SITS AT A STARBUCKS in Center City, already a few hours into her day. Her Blackberry chirps every few minutes. “I see a lot of my dad in these guys,” she says of Solomon and Dorch and the other runners. “He was an addict. I spent three years trying to fix him.”

After her mom kicked him out, Mahlum did everything she could to cure her dad. She tried to set goals for him. She gave him self-help books. It seemed like he was getting better, like he was breaking his addiction. She went off to college in Minnesota, then trekked east to Washington, D.C., for graduate school, a political communication program at American University. She kept running. It became her daily therapy.

All the while her dad had been telling her he wasn’t gambling, but she began to suspect he was slipping. “Dad, are you gambling again?” she finally asked him one day. He told her the truth. While before she’d wanted to save him, this time she was angry. He’d not only been gambling; he’d been lying to her. She didn’t speak to him for two weeks.

“Then I realized, this is my dad. He’s an addict.” She figured she’d stop trying to fix him and start trying to support him. “I was pushing him down a road he didn’t want to be on. I decided I’m going to be the person he can talk to. I’m going to make him feel okay talking about it. If I keep making him feel bad about where he is, he won’t be honest about where he is.”

It was a revelation. It changed her relationship with her father into a trusting one, and it has informed her approach to the guys with Back on My Feet. She has decided to be the person running beside them, whatever their pasts, whoever they are.

“I DON’T LEAVE ANYBODY.”

There’s something soldier-like about Mahlum’s guiding maxim, and so it’s fitting that it’s being tested this morning at Valley Forge National Historical Park, outside Philadelphia, where General Washington trained his men. It’s early October, and she’s taken the guys away from the grime of their usual urban jaunts around the grid, out to the rolling green fields of the suburbs. And roll they do. Run enough miles on the paths out here and you’re likely to see—or more specifically, get passed by—Catherine Ndereba or any number of elite Kenyans who use the park’s brutal hills to toughen themselves up. Anyone who wondered how Ndereba sailed up Heartbreak Hill to victory in the Boston Marathon four times might find their answer examining the topography of Valley Forge.

Craig Hall, for all his efforts, is no Kenyan. At 55, he’s one of the old men of the group. Mike Solomon, Abdullah Dorch, and the rest of the guys are far ahead on this morning’s run. Among rickety fences, retired cannons, and other vestiges of the Revolutionary War, Hall is slowing down and hurting, with several miles and hills to go, when Mahlum pulls up beside him. His feet never get very far off the ground to begin with, but at this point, they’re barely skating.

“Go ahead,” he says. “Just leave me.” His pride is wounded, and it doesn’t help that the girl who is running beside him looks like she could run forever. Not only have his cohorts left him in the dust, now he’s getting beat by a girl as well.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Mahlum tells him. “We’re almost there anyway.” Hall doesn’t really want to be left behind, she figures, he’s just proud, and being left is just what many of these guys have always known. Mahlum wants them, simply, to have something to rely on. Today, it’s her: She’s going to stick with Hall until the entire group finishes their loop. On Monday it means the run starts at 5:45 in the morning just like it always does, no matter what.

“Go ahead. I’m fine.” Hall keeps at it, but she chooses not to believe him. Finally the finish is in sight. The body that seemed unable to run another step has plenty of energy for the many high-fives and hugs that accompany a run completed. Hall seems grateful that Mahlum hadn’t listened when he told her to leave. But more than anything, he seems surprised.

STEPHEN METRAUX IS A HOMELESSNESS EXPERT AND PROFESSOR at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. He’s also a 2:36 marathoner. With those credentials, you’d figure he’d be Anne Mahlum’s loudest proponent. In some ways he is. “Anything that gets people running is a good thing as far as I’m concerned,” Metraux says. “I’m as much an evangelist for running as you’ll find. But be careful what you attribute to it. It’s not going to save anyone’s life.”

Soon after the running part of BOMF got off the ground, Mahlum began to integrate other services for its members. Running, in her eyes, is a test for living. “There are all these metaphors,” she says. “You’ve got to move forward, one step at a time. You can see progress.” She believes the dedication it takes to make it in a job can be witnessed in training. Once a member demonstrates a commitment in running, BOMF helps get him educational scholarships and job training. Recently, the organization began to make housing assistance grants to get members into a home of their own.

It’s Metraux’s opinion, though, anyone who succeeds in getting out of homelessness through BOMF might very well belong to a self-selected group who’d likely get out of homelessness without running. While the same skills and commitment that allow one to stick with running might be useful in putting one’s life back together, it’s not the running that’s “fixing” anybody. But Metraux does see something specific about running that can help. “It gets people in the community running with people who are homeless. When you’re homeless, you feel isolated; you don’t have contact with the general community. Running breaks down barriers. You get to know someone when you run with them. I think, ultimately, that’s where you get a benefit, for both sides.”

THE BACK ON MY FEET GUYS HAVE STOPPED CALLING every race a “marathon.” They know about nipple chafe and black toenails. They’ve run longer than nine miles. The sweaty summer runs have now been exchanged for crisp, long-sleeved mornings like this one, and the Philadelphia Half Marathon is just a couple of weeks away.

As the pack jogs through Chinatown, a group of homeless guys asleep on the sidewalk wake as they pass. “Good morning!” The unlikely spectators applaud and smile. “Keep on running!”

Abdullah Dorch is the only one of the men not participating in the morning greetings. “Something happened the other night,” he says, his typical coolness breaking into what looks like surprise for just a moment. “I heard music again. I started hearing music again.” He’s got a melody in his head for the first time in years. He looks almost frightened, as if he’d bumped into a friend he’d thought was long dead. For him, the music is a sign that he’s back to where he was before things started turning south. It means he’s doing something right, and he doesn’t want the silence to return.

IT’S RACE DAY. In front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, thousands of runners and spectators are milling about. A man wearing a black garbage bag walks along the grass reaching down every few feet to pat the grass, looking for a dry place to sit. Another sleeps in a sitting position against a tall tree. A pack of out-of-towners crowds around a giant statue of Rocky Balboa posing for pictures and shouting “Adrian!”

JUST CHILLIN

Steve Boyle

A booth for the BOMF runners has been set up near the first-aid tent. They start arriving early, an hour before the race. For the most part, everybody is quiet. There’s a lot of fretting about short sleeves or long sleeves, shorts or pants.

“How we gonna go out there?” says Abdullah Dorch.

“They have porta-johns.”

He heads off to find one.

All at once, the throngs around them start moving toward the starting line, and they follow.

“I just don’t have words for this,” says Dorch, a bib on his chest, surrounded by 14,000 people in the starting corral. “I don’t think I’ll have words for it until it’s over.” His face is expressionless, and he sways gently from side to side. A muffled megaphone announces two minutes until the starting gun. Dorch darts to the side, over a partition, and into trees nearby. He’s urinating for the second time in five minutes. Yes, he’s a runner now, no matter what happens next.

THE IN CROWD Moments before the start of his first half marathon, Solomon shows he’s ready to go the distance.

Steve Boyle

He makes it back into the corral just as the gun fires. The first half-mile is about stopping and starting, avoiding the jags of runners around him. As Dorch often does, he squints at his surroundings, as if trying to figure what it’s all about.

Just after mile one, the great running masses are split in two, each running around either side of a roundabout. Dorch goes to the right side, and he gazes left. For a moment it’s like being in one race and watching another, parallel, one. His quiet is suddenly broken by a big laugh. “I just had this memory,” he says. “I didn’t remember this until just now. I used to watch these things on TV when I was a kid. I remember seeing marathons on TV when I was a kid. I used to love watching them. I just loved watching, you know?” That he’s in the middle of one, suddenly, after a lifetime, and not even a year out of jail, has hit him as a pleasant revelation.

“I can’t believe…you know, what I love about this?” he asks, then pauses. “I love not knowing where it’s going. I’ve always loved getting into things that I don’t know how they’re going to end. I’m kind of a thrill seeker. And with this, it’s like I don’t know where this road is going, but I know that I don’t have to worry about looking over my shoulder.”

The thrill-seeking of his past often led him into dangerous things, but he feels like this running thing will keep him safe. “It’ so funny. A year ago, I asked the Lord to put me on a path, on a road.” He looks down at the yellow line beneath his feet. “I never knew it was going to really be a road.” Dorch smiles, shakes his head, and keeps on running.

Up ahead, Mike Solomon has run off the shivers that coursed from his shoulders down to his thighs at the start. He’s wearing a white “Back on My Feet” T-shirt and a white headband. His gait is unbroken and steady. Every so often he touches a thin piece of black plastic tucked into the waist of his short black shorts.

By mile nine, Solomon is speeding up, slowing down. He’ll be at 7:30 pace for a quarter mile, and as his concentration drifts he’ll fall back to 8:30s. Then he’ll wake up and make up the difference with a near sprint that’s too hard and too early, and he’ll spend a quarter mile recovering. After all the training, all the experience, he’s back to the runner he was on the Ben Franklin Bridge: impulsive, out of control, off pace. As he blows by people who passed him moments before, he catches himself.

“It’s like I’m doing a butt-lick, man.” The runner on his left looks at him, puzzled. “Fartlek. I mean fartlek!” He’d just learned, or more accurately, not learned, the word. His panting breath gives way to a big, embarrassed laugh, which in turn fades back into focus.

Solomon passes mile 11, and so every step from here until the finish is longer than he’s ever run before. His eyes are wide, wild, as if someone had just whispered shocking news in his ear. “Fifteen more minutes of running,” he says. “Just fifteen more minutes.” He knows he’ll make it, but there’s a desperation in his voice that suggests this all means a whole lot more to him than just finishing a footrace.

There’s a mile and a half to go, and it has begun to hurt. Eyes ahead, focused on the middle distance, Solomon reaches down and pulls the little piece of plastic from his waist. He opens his mouth and gently places it between his teeth and bites down to help deal with the pain. This is a boxer telling himself he has to take a punch if he’s going to have a chance to win the fight.

HOME SWEET HOME Solomon was the first BOMF finisher. Now, “when I tell another runner I ran a half marathon, they give me a hug.”

Steve Boyle

The plastic comes out again with 50 yards to go. Solomon finishes in 1:48:14. Abdullah Dorch is across the line in 2:02:43. He beams. The runners gather at the booth, joined by some of the other BOMF guys who had done an 8K and some who’d just been there to watch. Bananas are eaten, stories told, aching body parts pointed to. In a half hour, everybody heads back to the Sunday Breakfast Rescue Mission.

THAT FIRST PHILADELPHIA HALF MARATHON WAS JUST THE START for Back on My Feet. It continued to grow after getting its first bunch of runners through the race. Chapters are now up and running in five homeless shelters around Philadelphia, including its first women’s team. To date, 102 shelter residents have participated in BOMF. Fifteen have entered job training. Twenty-two have found jobs. Seventy-two members have entered a competitive race. The program has even begun to reach beyond Philadelphia with a new chapter set to open in Baltimore in March.

Mahlum is still running things and, of course, still running. Her organization now employs seven people full-time. As if she didn’t have enough to keep her busy, she made a goal to run a marathon on every continent by the time she turns 30. Only Australia and Antarctica remain, which she is saving for last. Her successes have not gone unnoticed: Last November Mahlum was recognized as a 2008 “CNN Hero,” an honor that brought with it a $25,000 award to Back on My Feet.

She says her goals continue to evolve. At first it was just about the guys she was running with, about being there for them. But she’s beginning to think about ways that the concept of bringing people together from different walks of life might be expanded and applied to a much wider stage. “You know, people come up to me and say, ‘Wow, what a great concept,’” Mahlum says. “And I think, Where have we gone wrong that this is a great idea, that this is a big deal? I mean, when you think about it, it’s just basic decent humanity.”

Like any program working with individuals battling addiction, mental illness, and countless socioeconomic barriers, Back on My Feet can’t save everybody. Abdullah Dorch left Sunday Breakfast after the half marathon, moving to a different shelter. Nobody’s quite sure why. Mahlum says he thought another resident was stealing his things. In any case, he kept running with the BOMF team for a few more months, but then he stopped showing up altogether. “No one’s heard from him in quite some time,” she says. For Mahlum, this is the most difficult aspect of life at BOMF. “We get very connected to our members. And then you wake up one day, and they’ll be gone.”

Still, for every Abdullah Dorch, there’s an Al Price, who in November completed another half marathon, this one in 1:42. Or James Shepherd, who no longer runs with BOMF but keeps in touch with Mahlum while caring for his sick wife. Or Darren Gordon, who moved to New Jersey to live with his girlfriend.

Which ones will make it? Only time will tell. “People have called me naive for thinking you can change the world through running,” says Mahlum. “But whether it’s dealing with a new job, family, or living on your own, you’re going to have to take that first step. There are no shortcuts. Running can help you understand that.”

Mike Solomon, it seems, has learned those lessons well. Six months after running the Philly half, he completed the Delaware Marathon, in 4:10:47. He later moved back to Delaware—his birthplace—to be with his family. He’s working three part-time jobs and trying to see his 13-year-old daughter every day. It’s tough to squeeze in miles around that schedule, but he still hits the roads whenever he can. Running, it seems, has become a part of him.

“It’s like when I tell my brother,” Solomon says, “‘I haven’t had a drink in eight months,’ or ‘Did you know I stopped smoking crack?’ He doesn’t care. He’s like, ‘So? You couldn’t have done that years ago before you wrecked four cars and who knows what?’ But then I go into Narcotics Anonymous, and they know what I’m talking about. It’s like the average person won’t get it, but when I tell another runner I ran a half marathon in 1:47, they give me a hug. Everybody’s got their own language.”

Story Update · September 15, 2016

Since 2007, Back on My Feet has served more than 6,000 homeless individuals. In addition to getting them into running, the organization has helped more than 1,500 people obtain housing and more than 2,000 find jobs. In 2013, Anne Mahlum left BOMF to launch a new fitness venture called solidcore, which operates 40 studios across the country. Now led by CEO Katy Sherratt, BOMF will open its 12th chapter this November in San Francisco. Says Mahlum, “To see it be so sustainable gives me a lot of joy. A founder always has to worry, once you’re gone, is what you’ve built going to live on?” Runner’s World was unable to obtain information about the Philadelphia runners in this piece from that city’s chapter, but the organization’s lasting impact is obvious in the stories of people like Eugene Hardy and David Doxzen. Hardy was a homeless veteran when he joined BOMF’s Atlanta chapter in 2013; he’s since logged 850 miles with the group, gotten his own apartment, and landed a full-time job at Home Depot. Doxzen rejoined the Baltimore chapter in 2015 after relapsing the year before; he’s been sober ever since. He ran his first marathon last year and helped found Baltimore’s BOMF alumni association, which he chairs. “I sensed what this could become after seeing what happened with my original group of guys,” Mahlum says. “I knew there were more people out there who would respond. Unfortunately, homelessness is everywhere—but so is running.” –Nick Weldon

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